A group of
respected XSLT experts have created a petition
against the xsl:script element, recently added to the
XSLT 1.1 Working Draft.
The element is considered harmful to the portability of XSLT
sheets, and contradictory to the statement that "XSLT is not intended as
a completely general-purpose XML transformation language".
The
petitioners include XSLT implementers (Alexey Gokhberg, Unicorn and Uche
Ogbuji, 4XSLT) and experts (Clark C. Evans, Peter Flynn, Francis Norton, Dave
Pawson, Tobias Reif, Adam Van Den Hoven) who are very concerned by the
addition of a xsl:script element,
which they see as far more dangerous for the
portability of XSLT sheets than the normalized extension mechanism that was
previously included in XSLT 1.1.
Their main
concern seems to be that XSLT beginners would jump into this facility to embed Java
or Javascript in their sheets without really learning the XSLT
subtleties -- a
slippery slope down which even confirmed XSLT developers may slide, since XPath
functions that cannot be defined using pure XSLT would be definable using Java
or Javascript in an xsl:script section.
Among
their grievances, they also note that this mechanism would lead the "average
user" to "assume that all XSLT processors must support Java and/or
Javascript" which is against the principle of language neutrality of XML,
dangerous for the authors of XSLT sheets and unbearable for non Java
implementations (Unicorn is a C++ implementation and 4XSLT is written in
Python).
Even though this petition comes late in the XSLT comments process, Scott Boag and
Steve Muench, two members of the W3C XSL Working Group, have encouraged formal
feedback and its authors hope to get sufficient user community support before
the 15th of March.
The
petition can be signed online.
Related
stories:
|